Thursday, October 11, 2012

Yes, This Year's Nobel Prize Chemistry Prize was given for Chemistry

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced yesterday and the reaction from many chemists in the various social media outlets was of outrage that the prize was again awarded for work in biochemistry and not "true" chemistry.

I am not sympathetic to the arguments in the least.

I've yet to see anyone in social media complaining who actually stood a chance to win the prize. The uproar is all caused by bystanders who are never ever going to be considered for the prize. As such, this no different than sports fan complaining about a call in the big match that went against their team. And the end result is the same in both cases. The sun will rise tomorrow and life goes on and years from now no one except the complainers themselves will remember their complaints and their bitterness.

That's pretty heavy on the bio side of things, isn't it? Well, how about another major chemistry journal such as The Journal of the American Chemical Society?(I bolded the articles that are clearly bio-oriented, and I arguably could have bolded even more)

Mechanistic Studies on Histone Catalyzed Cleavage of Apyrimidinic/Apurinic Sites in Experimental Verification of the Homoaromaticity of 1,3,5-Cycloheptatriene and Evaluation of the Aromaticity of Tropone and the Tropylium Cation by Use of the Dimethyldihydropyrene Probe

While not as bio-bent as Nature Chemistry, there still are a lot of those awful biochemical names that end in -ase and all those protein code names... It's just horrible to think that someone would let that soil the pages of a pure chemistry journal like JACS. I could go one with other journals, but you get the point. Chemistry journals long ago decided that chemistry could have a strong bio-base orientation and still qualify as chemistry.

The underlying foundation for much of chemistry is changing from its traditional petroleum-basis to a biological basis. This is most apparent in the areas of polymers and fuels, but it will soon spread to the rest of organic chemistry and beyond. But more to the point, the reactions that are creating these materials ARE NOT in many cases, the classic reactions that we all learned as sophomores, but are different and will require that synthetic chemists of the future become familiar with these bio-based reaction options as well.

What I find most laughable about this whole situation is that I'm the guy that is on the backside of my career and yet I'm the one that is both applauding this new breadth of "chemistry" and having to tell younger people to adjust to the new paradigm. Shouldn't I be the old curmudgeon who grinds my teeth and complains about those upstart bio people who are coming on my yard ("Get off my grass or I'll get my shotgun...")? I don't get it.

While I'm not going to predict specific individuals who are going to the Nobel Prize in the future, I will say that an ever increasing number of the awards are going to go to "bio" chemistry in all it's many forms. That's the way research and industry are heading. If you don't like it, that's too bad. You can do no more to change this than you can stop the tide from coming in.

Update: Stuart Cantrill, the Chief Editor of Nature Chemistry pointed out that the articles I originally had posted were incorrect. And that I still wasn't right when I corrected it.

4 comments:

Well, you got it right the second time you corrected it... And just one comment on the bio stuff in NChem. Yes, we do publish a fair amount - we try and define chemistry as broadly as we can. You won't find many molecular biology papers in our journal though... and it's not because we're rejecting them all!